


make the most of what we yet may spend

by Oreki



Category: Fate/stay night & Related Fandoms, Fate/strange fake
Genre: Gen, Introspection, again there's some crossing-over between fate lore and actual epic lore, enkidu is only there a little bit, so it may not be completely accurate to either, this is sort of a companion piece to my last one but there is only a little overlap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-30
Updated: 2017-12-30
Packaged: 2019-02-23 21:12:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13198662
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Oreki/pseuds/Oreki
Summary: He grows up looking at the ziggurats rising to the violet sky, at the temple precinct of Ishtar, where white clothing flashes like a signal to the sun above.





	make the most of what we yet may spend

**Author's Note:**

> i know this comes as a surprise but i actually DO write things that are not introspection. but Not Today  
> archer gilgamesh himself came to me and forced me to write this so i suppose here we are. i am so sorry

Two-thirds god. One-third human.

A demigod, or perhaps something more divine?

Whatever the case, he is something not wholly of mortals, or of the gods. He was intended, made to be a bridge: to cross the gap between the early realm and that of the gods. He grows up looking at the ziggurats rising to the violet sky, at the temple precinct of Ishtar, where white clothing flashes like a signal to the sun above.

When he is a boy, he doesn’t yet understand. He comprehends little, yet he reaches out his hand to the people he will one day rule, and he offers them what kindness he can, and with his other hand he reaches out to his heavenly patrons, and he asks the spirit gods of the sky and sea to show kindness to the great city.

Uruk.

The city of Gilgamesh.

When he grows, he learns to understand that he does not rule with his people. He has a power that the mortals do not: he has the Gate, he has the kingship, he will become the King of Heroes. The gods know not what they have made, for the two-thirds divine will become something that outstrips even their fame. He is not so old when he first realizes this. He is wholly different, not a portion mortal and a portion godly but something else entirely. He is not a bridge to connect two settlements; no, he is a wall, the outer reaches of both which will eventually force them together. This is what he tells himself, and it is the power that he speaks of to his people. His treasures, his arsenal: they render him invincible.

He is untouchable.

The loneliness is something that he could not have anticipated, but is not a proper ruler one who sits atop the throne on his own? There is no democracy in his mind, no inkling that a king, too, has trusted consorts. Rather, it is proper that a king should remove himself from his people, pit himself against them, for he is above them. He hardly spares solitude a thought, allowing his voice to give words to it only once.

And so he takes, and he takes — women, drink, land. There is nothing here to stop him; even if the peasantry rose up against him together, he has accumulated countless treasures by now. The Gate is inexhaustible, and, he muses as he watches the sun rise, so is he.

He thinks it again and again, until finally he sleeps, and in his dreams —

_He sits under a night sky, with the surrounding area a blur, and he sees nothing but the stars. They are far, and the longer he watches, the smaller they seem to be: the heavens, rising away from him, even as he stretches out his arm in hopes of reaching even some paltry distance toward them._

_He feels pathetically mortal. So small, compared to the cosmos, that he could be called insignificant._

_The stars have begun to fade to the lightening of morning when a flash of movement draws his eyes back. A shooting star. A meteor, he knows, and he hears the voice of his mother speaking to him: for him, this is a companion, a friend. He stands, opens his mouth to speak, and —_

Laughable.

But even after he wakes, the image remains in his mind. He closes his eyes, and they see nothing but the advent of the meteor: bright. Searing.

Even still, he expects anything but for a dirt-covered mongrel to face him at the temple of Uruk, proclaiming that they are here to bring him down. The thought is amusing: does a mole believe it can touch the sacred bird, the hawk? Creatures of the earth have no business trying to bring down those of the heavens. He will crush them in a heartbeat.

But that isn’t what happens.

Instead, he himself takes the first blow. The stranger’s fist cracks against his cheekbone, and the pain strikes like lightning across the rest of his face. There’s blood now, in his mouth, from where his own teeth cut into skin — whoever this is, they have drawn first blood.

… Laughable. He takes the second strike.

As the battle continues on, Gilgamesh knows not how much time passes, simply that it has long transcended from a chore to fight against them to a pleasure. He laughs, many times, bellicose but also amazed, exhilarated. The stranger’s gray eyes have become fiery with the thrill of this fight, with dodging weapons from the Gate, staining the myriad treasures with the dust from the ground, and he knows that his own eyes mirror theirs.

It is many days, though he knows it not, before they both fall backwards, and for a moment he hears a laugh: unbridled, up to the heavens, filled with mirth for one’s own shortcomings but also with admiration, and he realizes that it is his own laugh, and his own emotions. He says something foolish about corpses, something that he now remembers little of, but the voice he hears next, and his own response, are things that he knows well.

“Do you not regret the treasures you have spent?”

It is an amusing question, and he grins before he speaks again. "Why, if it's someone I should use it on, then it's not unthinkable to do them the favor."

This is the companion his mother spoke of.

The one who grows to understand him.

When he speaks, they comprehend, and it is them alone to whom he smiles as he did in childhood.

With them, he defeats Humbaba, the beast of the Cedar Forest.

With them, he begins to see his people again — not through the distorted lens of a ruler, but to really _see_ them, as humans, as those like him. And he begins to see this once-stranger as one of them: more human than they think, more human than the name of the _Creation of Enki_ implies. Enkidu, he thinks. It is their name now, not a mark of the gods’ ownership.

It is them who is with him, when the end comes to pass.

The end begins before any of them know it, with the coming of Ishtar. Perhaps it is unwise to insult her as he does, but he is on top of the world. He is invincible; he will be the king over all others, and even the one-third mortal cannot stop him from outpacing the gods. It is this belief that he has held for years, one which defines who he is. So, with a sneer, he faces down the goddess who has breached the walls of Uruk, and he says: “I have nothing to give to she who lacks nothing at all.”

Perhaps that is his folly.

The next seven years are spent — languishing. Uruk grows weaker under the storms and the floods. He, who once found pleasure in surfeit, begins to understand the plight of having nothing. The Bull of Heaven is unopposable, a divine animal stronger than anything that has been created by the hand of man.

But Gilgamesh is not merely a man, and neither is Enkidu.

They slay the bull working together, and the fight is something wonderful. To a king who has not fought with his full strength since those days in front of the Temple of Uruk, it is exhilarating, something that draws breath from his lungs and something that compels him to inhale even more deeply. He is splattered in divine blood and he cares not, and he laughs freely, again, facing the sky, and Enkidu laughs with him.

Because neither of them knows, then, that there are few things more fleeting than a shooting star.

When they are dying, Gilgamesh doesn’t know until the first time they stumble, when they’re walking with him. Until the first time he looks down at their feet, and he realizes that they are becoming what they were to begin with — nothing but a piece of clay.

He spoke, not too long ago, words that he now regrets.

“Why do you mourn?”

“Where there is life, there is death. That is an immutable truth.”

Now he speaks again, words that he will never forget.

“You do have worth. You alone — have this worth. I hereby declare: In all this world, only one shall be my friend. Thus — not for all eternity shall their worth ever change.”

These are the last words they hear him speak, and they do not hear the cry that rings against the decorated walls of Uruk, and echoes up to the highest spire of the Temple of Ishtar.

Time passes, but he is not aware of it.

Until suddenly, he is.

He feels one thing: fear.

His only friend, construct of the divine. His only equal. Someone who had just the power he did, and the same arsenal: struck down so easily.

So fragile was mortal life.

He seeks to end that mortality. He almost doesn’t even realize that he throws away his kingship, his city, his power, his dignity, until he is well away from Uruk, walking through the trees on his own. He laughs again, but this time it is hollow, twisted, reflecting only the desire he has to run from this fear.

He travels, and he speaks, and he becomes not a king, not even divine. Just mortal. More mortal than he has ever been, because he is no longer invincible, no longer untouchable. He no longer stands at the top of the world, and at the top of his city; Uruk is a shadow past the horizon behind him, its rising ziggurats merely clusters of blackness should he look back.

He does not.

He travels, and he speaks, and he meets with goddesses, and he sees clusters of shining red fruit on trees with foliage of beautiful gemstones, and still he does not spare them a thought, because for all of his majesty and power and for all of the world’s majesty and power, everything must one day wither and die — even carnelian fruits.

He finds immortality.

It is only by that spring, when he first hears the slithering of scales over rock, that everything changes again.

His hair is still wet, still hanging in such an unsightly way in front of his eyes, when he runs from the water to the jar where he has left his salvation, suddenly all the more human in the way his heart beats a tattoo at the base of his throat, but by the time he reaches it, there is only a shed skin curled at the base of the glass, and the herb of immortality is gone, gone, gone.

With it, his hopes.

But a dawning thought grows in his mind. He may not be able to attain everlasting life, or to save his one and only friend, but what he can do is what Siduri told to him. Immortality is something that the gods kept for themselves — and Gilgamesh is no god. He is no pure mortal, either, but he is not of the divine. He recounts each moment thus far: his time as king, his time overseeing his city. He lived how he wanted, and he took, but he knows that there was something invaluable about that time.

In Uruk, he was isolated from all others, but at the same time, he was not apart from them.

People are the king’s power.

He realizes this, all of a sudden, standing next to the overturned jar, and he laughs. It’s the same laugh he laughed when he first fell opposing that stranger in front of the Temple of Uruk, the same laugh he laughed when he stood exalting in the blood of the Bull of Heaven: something utterly free, something that seems so unrestrained that he himself can’t stop it, and even if no one is around to hear it, the laugh changes something.

He dries himself, and he dresses, and he leaves the jar on its side, and he doesn’t look at it as he walks toward the Euphrates.

He finds himself a boatman, and he begins the trip back to Uruk. It is to be a long ride: he has traveled a long time, over a vast expanse of land. He has crossed from where he was king, into territories beyond. The lapping of the Euphrates is gentle, and the day turns into night several times, as they return to the city that Gilgamesh once ruled.

As the tallest spires of the buildings creep into sight, and the walls rise above the horizon in the early morning light, he looks upon his city, and he feels a pride he has not felt since his earliest days as king. This is his place; his home; his domain; his salvation.

He looks to the boatman, and as he takes his place as king again, he speaks of Uruk, one more time.

_“Study the brickwork, study the fortification;_

_climb the ancient staircase to the terrace;_

_study how it is made; from the terrace see_

_the planted and fallow fields, the ponds and orchards._

_One league is the inner city, another league_

_is orchards; still another the fields beyond;_

_over there is the precinct of the temple…_

_Three leagues and the temple precinct of Ishtar._

_Measure Uruk, the city of Gilgamesh.”_

 


End file.
